Nine ½ Weeks at 40: Part 1 of 2
Mystery Novelist, Husband & Wife Adaptation, Pulling the Plug, Restarting
NINE ½ WEEKS (1986) is exquisitely lit and decorated theater with no show to put on. It’s photographed as well as a feature film can be, and under the circumstances–its depiction of a sadomasochistic relationship, with strong sexual content–is cast as well as it probably could’ve been, with two actors who felt they had a lot to prove, going for broke along with their director. The material so upset test audiences that the final version presented to American theatergoers is honed as if by a backhoe, leaving open graves where its story or characters should be.
In a time when a writer could publish anonymously and keep their personal life out of the public eye, much about Ingeborg Day remains unreported. An article by Sarah Weinman published November 2012 in the New Yorker fills in some details about her life. Day was born in Graz, the capital city of the southern Austrian province of Styria, in 1940. Two years earlier, her father, like the rest of his colleagues in the Austrian police, were inducted into the SS. At the age of seventeen, Day made her way to the States to participate in a one-year study abroad program in Syracuse, New York sponsored by the American Field Service. In 1960, she married an American studying to be an Episcopal priest. They settled in Indiana, where Day earned a B.A. in German studies from Goshen College and spent the next several years teaching. Their daughter was born in 1963, but the death of their infirm son at the age of seven took a heavy toll on Day. She met an artist named Tom Shannon who was also living in the Midwest and left her husband, relocating her daughter and herself to Manhattan with her lover.
Day spent four years as an editor at Ms., the magazine co-founded by Gloria Steinem, and it was during this period–whether she was still in a relationship with Shannon is unclear–that she met a man who exploited her desire to be dominated sexually. Their tryst lasted nine and a half weeks, and there is evidence Day admitted herself to a mental institution to seek treatment for what had led her to the arrangement in the first place. Day’s experience served as the basis for a book she published in 1978 titled Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair. Rather than market it as fiction, Day and her publisher Henry Robbins/ Dutton maintained the story was real, and for the next five years, the author would be known by the name of her narrator, “Elizabeth McNeill.” She published a memoir, Ghost Waltz, under that pen name in 1980, but Day would never publicly address her pseudonym, or comment about the movie version of Nine and a Half Weeks. She remarried, to a man whose care she provided for late in his life, and struggling with her own health, took her life at age 70. Her husband passed away four days later.
Zalman King was a modestly successful American television actor, working his way up to a series regular on the short-lived ABC drama The Young Lawyers in 1970. Like many in Los Angeles, what King really wanted to do was direct, and his sculptor wife Patricia Louisianna Knop was willing to help. In an article by Pat Broeske published February 23, 1986 in the San Francisco Chronicle, Knop admitted she didn’t share her husband’s passion for Nine and a Half Weeks, not at first. “I found it frightening–what that woman went through. But we kept talking about it, and I became more fascinated. Also, I couldn’t believe all the excitement the book was causing. There was so much anger about it.” Not long after the book was published, Knop & King optioned the film rights to Nine and a Half Weeks and adapted a screenplay together. In an interview with Psychotronic magazine in the summer of 1992, King discussed his big break behind the camera. [The film would be referred to in print as 9 ½ Weeks, while its opening credits would bestow it Nine ½ Weeks.] King declared, “9 ½ Weeks was an obsession. I read the book and wrote the screenplay with Pat. I also intended to direct. Everybody loved it. At the risk of sounding conceited, it really was an excellent script, and everybody wanted to make it, but we’d get right down to the wire and they’d pull away. So getting it made was an obsession for me. I knew it would be successful. I was positive it was something people wanted to see. A lot of my friends put up a lot of money, and, at a certain point, I had to make a decision.”
King had lassoed a British producer of commercials and feature films named Antony Rufus-Isaacs to produce Nine ½ Weeks with him, and they got their script to Adrian Lyne. The director had spent the 1970s making commercials–for clients like Levi Strauss–that were more exciting than most of the television they were sponsoring and a lot of the movies. Lyne made his leap to feature film directing Jodie Foster, Cherrie Curie (lead vocalist of the punk band The Runaways), and Scott Baio in an American teen exploitation titled Foxes (1980). To the astonishment of many, audiences–young women mostly–propelled Lyne’s sophomore effort to blockbuster status. Starring an unknown named Jennifer Beals, Flashdance (1983) sold more tickets than any movie released that year not titled Return of the Jedi or Terms of Endearment. Its soundtrack album was an equally huge seller. Permitted to bring in Keith Barish, producer of Endless Love (1981) and Sophie’s Choice (1982), to advocate for him as an executive producer, Lyne turned down an offer to direct a film adaptation of the stage musical A Chorus Line in favor of Elizabeth McNeill’s novel. King continued, “After Flashdance, Adrian Lyne was very hot and he expressed interest in directing 9 ½ Weeks. I figured that if a director who’d just come off a mega-million dollar hit, people would probably be willing to take a chance on 9 ½ Weeks and I was right.”
When it came time to cast John, the investment banker who Elizabeth enters a sadomasochistic relationship with, King suggested to Lyne they consider Mickey Rourke. Impressed by the actor’s work in Rumble Fish (1983), Lyne agreed. This pairing of director and leading man snared the commitment of TriStar Pictures, a newly formed risk-sharing partnership between Columbia Pictures (then owned by Coca-Cola), CBS, and HBO. Director Sydney Pollock had been commissioned by the nascent studio as a production consultant and after championing their inaugural production The Natural (1984), did so again with Nine ½ Weeks. To fill the role of Elizabeth, both Teri Garr and Kathleen Turner interviewed with Lyne, while model/ actors Kim Basinger and Isabella Rossellini submitted auditions on tape. Basinger had popped on screen in Never Say Never Again (1983) and The Man Who Loved Women (1983) and was getting notice for a photoshoot she’d done for Playboy magazine in 1981 that hit newsstands in February 1983, with a golden-haired Basinger gracing the cover as well as the centerfold.
In a detailed account by Nina Darnton published in the New York Times on March 9, 1986 chronicling Basinger’s experiences on the show, the actor recounted leaving her audition for Nine ½ Weeks in tears, feeling humiliated rehearsing a scene for Lyne and Rourke in which Elizabeth is ordered by John to roleplay a prostitute, with John as her john. Basinger claimed she told her agent she wanted nothing more to do with the project and wouldn’t accept a role in it. When Lyne did pursue her to accept the role of Elizabeth, Basinger came to view the job as a challenge. “I knew if I got through this it would make me stronger, wiser. I was going against my total grain. I felt disgust, humiliation, but when you go against your grain you just know that emotions you never knew you had will surface.” One of Lyne’s instructions to Rourke and Basinger was that he didn’t want them speaking to each other again prior to the start of production. The director explained his methods to the New York Times. “She needed to be scared of him. If they went out and had coffee together, we’d lose that edge.” Lyne wanted to bottle the sexual energy and hostility he’d observed in rehearsals. “After that, I didn’t want them to meet again until they began work. I didn’t want them to have any relationship that would exclude me. I wanted to have the ten weeks of shooting of the movie be like the nine and a half weeks of the relationship.”
Patricia Knop & Zalman King no longer involved with Nine ½ Weeks as writers, Lyne and associate producer Steven Reuther had commissioned a male screenwriter to dial in changes Lyne wanted to incorporate. Turning in his draft three days before TriStar had deadlined them for a script, Lyne was distraught by the liberties their new screenwriter had taken with the material. Reuther contacted a writer he knew named Sarah Kernochan and offered her a weekend of work. Kernochan had written a highly regarded spec script titled The Psychic about a woman who utilizes her ESP ability to manipulate a client into loving her, and when that fails, resorts to stalking him. Kernochan was commissioned to take shreds that Lyne and Reuther were cutting from their scripts and write connective material that would allow them to paste together a coherent script. Lyne was so impressed with Kernochan’s work that he added her to the payroll, and her contributions led to a screen credit, her first: screenplay by Patricia Knop & Zalman King and Sarah Kernochan, based on the novel by Elizabeth McNeill. With cameras set to roll on April 16, 1984 in New York, TriStar sought relief for a serious case of buyer’s remorse, making the decision to place the project in turnaround. The studio took the risk of having to pay Lyne, Rourke and Basinger a sum of $4 million not to make Nine ½ Weeks, not for TriStar. The studio’s CEO, Victor Kaufman, made the decision to pull the plug.
In an article by Dale Pollock published in the Los Angeles Times on April 24, 1984, an anonymous senior executive at TriStar stated, “Part of our philosophy is to rely on the filmmaker and let him make his own picture. Rather than get into an adversary relationship with this director, we decided to put the film into turnaround.” Lyne clarified, “TriStar wanted to do a movie about two rare birds in paradise, which I never really understood. I wanted it to have more humanity and be less of an art movie. I wanted it to be something audiences in Ohio could really see in terms of themselves.” Keith Barish tried to allay concerns that Nine ½ Weeks was toxic material. “It’s not whips and chains and cigarette burns. It’s really a psychological love story between two obsessive people, one of whom is continually pushing the other to the limit. We think it could be a breakthrough movie.” To raise financing before they had to send their entire cast and crew home, Barish put in a call to producer Mark Damon, chairman of Producers Sales Organization, a company Damon had co-founded in 1977 to sell American films to international distributors. Looking to expand from distribution to production, PSO had merged with the Delphi limited partnership companies to launch a five-year, $350 million slate of their own films, which would get off to a disastrous start with The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986), Nine ½ Weeks (1986) and 8 Million Ways To Die (1986).
One of Damon’s financiers was Sidney Kimmel, who’d started as an inventory clerk in the garment industry before founding Jones New York, a clothing line catering to fashion-savvy professional women. Kimmel’s first roll of the dice as a movie producer would be Nine ½ Weeks, but Mark Damon–credited as one of the film’s four producers with Zalman King, Antony Rufus-Isaacs and Sidney Kimmel–had already been selling Nine ½ Weeks in Japan and other international markets, and would raise most of the budget overseas. Though MGM agreed to distribute the picture domestically, its financing tree would prompt Sarah Kernochan to point out that Nine ½ Weeks was more of a European film than American one. Impressively, principal photography was underway two weeks after the original start date, on April 30, 1984. Manhattan was mined for locations. Elizabeth (improbably) walks to work on the Lower East Side under the Williamsburg Bridge, on Delancey Street South. The art gallery where she works was found on the corner of Spring Street/ Mercer Street. The Chinese grocery store where Elizabeth first sees John was shot in a working Chinese market on Canal Street/ Bayard Street, while the flea market where they speak to each other for the first time was the Chelsea Market, then held in a parking lot between 25th Street and 26th Street in the Chelsea neighborhood.
Suerken’s Restaurant, a historic German bar in Lower Manhattan long since gone, was used to film Elizabeth and John’s lunch date. Also lost in the past was H. Kauffman & Sons Saddlery Co, where the couple shop, despite not being very interested in horses (the tack shop was founded in 1875 and held on until 1996). The houseboat John takes Elizabeth to was shot at the 79th Street Boat Basin on the Hudson River. The Subway Arcade, Wonder Wheel and Boardwalk West in Coney Island were all used as locations for the couple’s date. The film’s most memorable location was the Clock Tower Building, found in the Tribeca neighborhood. Seeking to capture a relationship as close to real time as he could, Lyne had insisted Nine ½ Weeks be filmed in continuity, at least roughly. Mickey Rourke’s decision to stay in character–an aloof Wall Street operator who wraps a gorgeous woman around his finger–for ten weeks might have qualified as more vacation than work, while Basinger’s decision to match Rourke by living with her character–a vulnerable divorcée who falls under the control of a powerful man–took a toll on her health, as well as the health of her marriage, to Ron Snyder-Britton, a painter she’d met while she was an actor and he was a makeup artist on the movie Hard Country (1981).
Part 2 of 2 of my Nine 1/2 Weeks retrospective is coming to Video Days on Friday, February 13, 2026.